Internet access for all: how the home access programme brings us one step closer
June 2009
Kim Thomas
Among the poorest 10 percent of homes, only one in five has Internet access. It’s a stark reminder of the digital divide: at a time when many school children are discovering the wealth of research opportunities the Internet can offer or chatting to teachers online, others are being left on the wayside.
It’s easy to imagine that Internet access is an unnecessary luxury, like high-definition television. This is far from the truth, however. Researchers have discovered that the lack of Internet access plays a major part in exacerbating the gap in attainment between rich and poor children. When the Institute of Fiscal Studies analysed data from the DCSF’s Longitudinal Survey of Young People in England, it found that children who had a computer at home had significantly better KS4 test scores than those without. At the same time, losing access to a computer is associated with a reduction of 20 GCSE points, even after controlling for previous attainment.
The government has decided to tackle the problem head-on. Becta, the government agency promoting the use of technology in learning, has been appointed to administer a £300m Home Access programme to offer grants to poor families that will enable them to buy a home computer with one year’s access to the Internet. The programme, which has been piloted in Oldham and Suffolk, makes the £475 grant available to any family with a child aged between 5 and 16 who is eligible for free school meals.
The programme has four aims, says Niel McLean, executive director at Becta. The primary one is providing “more opportunities for kids to participate in their formal schoolwork.” The others are to enable them to engage in informal learning; to involve parents in their children’s learning; and to allow parents to engage with the school. And, he says, there are potential “spin-off benefits”, such as improving the parents’ own digital literacy skills. In one of the pilot authorities, he says, having Internet access meant that one unemployed parent was able to get a job after filling in an online application form.
The pilot launched in October last year. Oldham and Suffolk were chosen because they represented a broad mix of characteristics – such as urban and rural, northern and southern – that would provide a good dry run for a national roll-out. To make the grant easy to apply for and administer, eligibility for free school meals was used as the sole criterion to judge whether families were entitled to the grant or not.
The scheme was publicised partly through schools, and partly through newspaper articles and local authority one-stop shops. Applications were processed quickly, and families were given a grant that they could spend on particular computers from any one of six approved suppliers. The computers are preloaded with a productivity suite and security software, and are designed to be used out-of-the-box, without the need to install extra service packs.
Stuart Bailey, head of Parkside Pupil Referral Unit, has been working on the Suffolk pilot, and has been instrumental in making sure the message gets out to parents. “We targeted heads first and foremost, because we obviously realised early on that schools have an enormous part to play in the home access scheme,” he says. As a result, schools have been heavily involved in providing help and support, in some cases offering basic ICT training to parents. At Parkside, the principle of home access has been in place for two years, and Stuart has seen the benefits first-hand. Parkside aims to offer a curriculum that is “creative and imaginative,” he says, adding: “Technology is central to engaging pupils in their learning.”
So, how popular has the scheme proved? “It has gone like a rocket,” says Niel. By May, the programme had awarded 10,000 grants to low-income families. “I think even we were surprised by how popular this has proved to be,” he adds.
One of the families to benefit from the scheme was single mum Kanwal Khokhar and her nine-year-old son Reehan, who attends Werneth Primary School in Oldham. Kanwal had been keen to buy a computer for Reehan for a long time, but couldn’t afford it. The scheme has been “absolutely brilliant,” she says, and Reehan, who is already adept with a computer, has taught her how to use it: “He uses it for schoolwork, and I use it to pay my bills.” Now, she says, she doesn’t need to ask the teachers about Reehan’s work, because she can see what he’s doing, and when she needs to use the Internet, she doesn’t have to make an appointment at the library.
There are plenty of other stories like Kanwal’s. The anecdotal evidence suggests that the scheme is going well: Niel’s favourite example is a disabled parent who said that the computer offered her child opportunities she’d never been able to offer herself. But a more formal evaluation, using both quantitative and qualitative techniques, will provide the true test of the programme’s success. This evaluation, which has already started, and will run until 2011, is being carried out by a team at the Institute of Education in conjunction with SQW Consulting. The team will use the findings from the pilot programme to inform the national roll-out, and then evaluate the success of the national programme.
The national roll-out will begin this autumn. The aim is to start the grant application process just before Christmas, so that the first families start receiving their grants in January. Niel says he is “pretty confident” that the scheme will provide grants to a quarter of a million families across the country.
It will be a while before the results of the evaluation become evaluation. The hope is that the roll-out will have a positive impact, not just on educational attainment, but the life-chances of whole families. Stuart, who has seen the difference Internet access has made in his own school, is confident it will. “It does open up a lot of opportunities, not just for learning, but for simple things that we take for granted,” he says. “The whole world can open up for a family.”